Search the Seven Hills (35 page)

Marcus shook his head. “My family’s said all it’s going to,” he replied in a hard voice. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, but I’m not going to kill the living to honor the dead, and if they’ve captured Dorcas, they’ll know someone’s on their trail. We haven’t time to waste.” He turned to go. “The funeral’s at the sixth hour. I should be back before the sun’s well down. I expect my mother will save me a cake from the banquet afterward.”

In the doorway he was stopped by Telesphorus’ voice. “Although it hardly does to say so to someone entrusted with a mission of this sort in such a place,” said the priest, in that same hard, half-mocking tone, “go with the grace of God, my son.” He raised a hand, to sketch a holy sign in the air between them. “Heaven knows that the Son of God himself saved people from worse places than that.”

The House of Silanus was an ancient one; its tombs lay in a great private garden beside the Appian Way a mile or so beyond the gates of the city. As he bent his shoulder under the weight of his father’s bier, Marcus looked about him at the other members of the funeral cortege and knew that the old man had been right. There were few enough trueborn scions of the ancient houses in evidence, and the ones there were were men like Porcius Craessius: highborn, wealthy, and appallingly dissolute, who poured out an eternal stream of money in a vain attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives. More of them were like Garovinus—who’d had himself adopted into a minor branch of the Cornelius family—or Quindarvis, whose father had made his money in speculations in Egyptian wheat. They both wore the purple-bordered togas of their senatorial rank and walked with bowed heads in silence among the mourners. There were a great many of the Senate in the procession. The music of tubas, of cithara and bagpipes, the wailing of the flutes and the keening of the hired mourners reverberated from the walls of the basilicas and temples as they crossed the noon hush of the Forum, and rang among the tall buildings of the circus district, as they crossed toward the Appian Gate.

The funeral moved slowly, the pace and the dirge weaving themselves together into a lugubrious whole that drove all other thought from his mind. Stiff-backed with outraged piety, Caius bore the other front corner of the bier. Just behind him, Marcus could hear Felix’s agonized whimpers at every crash of the cymbals. After two days of continual drinking, his brother looked in worse case than the corpse. Over the wailing of the mourners, he listened for the sounds of his mother’s or sister’s voice, but perhaps the music drowned them. In any case, by the laws of the old republic, such outcry would have been thought unseemly.

Sweat rolled down his face beneath the muffling folds of his drawn-up toga. The few passersby, loitering before the siesta hour, stepped respectfully aside, but at this hour even the city seemed hushed. Marcus wondered if, wherever she was, Tullia could hear the faint strains of the music passing by.

The garden in which this branch of the family had its tombs was unwalled, a quiet and well-kept place, redolent of citrus trees and myrtle. His father’s tomb lay some distance in, near the columbarium of the family freedmen and slaves. It had been built some years ago; the young plane trees planted earlier were already taller than its corniced roof. His father had always said that he would wall the garden—no traveler, he had declared, would use
his
tomb as a privy—but like so many other things, it had never been got to.

They laid him in his sarcophagus, wrapped in his shroud and already starting to smell. They sealed the tomb, being sure to leave the little tubes down which offerings could be pushed or poured at the Feast of Families, killed the lamb they had brought and poured out blood and wine. It was late afternoon by the time it was over, the clear crystal light softening the faces of those who stood around the tomb. Seemly things were said; his mother put back her veils just enough to drink a little of the wine. The rest of it was poured through the tube that led into the sarcophagus itself, the final drink shared with her lord.

Then they returned in silence to the city.

It was close to sunset when they reached the house. The slaves were already stirring about, making preparations for the funeral banquet. His father’s associates and longtime clients were hanging about the atrium, talking over the funeral, or the emperor’s campaigns in the East, or discussing the games. Marcus slipped away as quickly as he could and crossed the garden to his own room, moving swiftly to avoid Caius. Even without his own concerns that evening, he had no desire to be trapped into a funeral banquet.

His room was almost dark, facing northeast into the court. He threw off his white toga and tunic and pulled from the chest the clothes he’d cached there earlier in the afternoon: a dark-blue dinner suit he’d stolen from Felix’s room, the hems of tunic and mantle embroidered alike with a delicate line of tiny bullion stars. Absolutely the latest thing, Felix had assured him. Marcus, regarding himself in the long mirror of polished brass, with his cropped hair and knobby knees, thought he looked like an ass in it.

If Caius sees me, he thought as he slipped down the breezeway toward the atrium, he really will kill me.

From the drawing room he heard his brother’s voice, welcoming a late-coming guest. “...such an arduous journey, to return to such grief. We are honored at your presence. For all your political differences, I know that our father always respected you as a man.”
(Another politic lie,
thought Marcus. Of the precious few men their father had respected, none had espoused politics that differed from his.) “We would be honored to have you at our board.”

“No,” replied a rich, mellifluous orator’s voice that brought Marcus’ heart up into his throat. “Caius Silanus Senior and I were old enemies. I would not do injustice toward his feelings about me by eating at his table, even after his death.” Marcus glided to the curtains as silently as he could, nearly tripping over a footstool in his stealth. Through a fold in the curtains he could see Caius, tall and pompous in his white dinner suit and plain house slippers, standing in the ocher lamplight beside the vestibule doors. The man before him was shorter than he by half a head, dark, middle-aged, wearing the purple-bordered toga over a dark tunic smutched with the dust of travel. His handsome face was drawn with fatigue and grief, but he held himself like a man supremely used to command. He went on, “It has been, as you say, an arduous journey, to a most bitter homecoming. I am here only to fetch my wife, and to speak with my cousin Quindarvis, if you will be so good as to let them know that I have returned.”

Caius bent his head in respect. Straton came in with a lamp; the flicker of its oily topaz flame threw shadows over the guest’s face and drew a deep glint of long-burning anger from the dark eyes. Caius said, “Straton? Will you go to Lady Aurelia Pollia and tell her that her husband, the prefect Varus, has returned and is looking for her.”

When you are going to take any act in hand, remind yourself what kind of an act is it. If you are going to bathe, place before yourself what happens in the bath; some splashing the water, others pushing against one another, others abusing one another, and some stealing: and thus with more safety you will undertake the matter, if you say to yourself, 1 now intend to bathe, and to maintain my will in a manner conformable to nature.

Epictetus

P
LOTINA’S BROTHEL WAS BUILT
above and behind the Baths of the Golden Swordsman, and Marcus spent a long time simply lying in the warm tiled pool, watching the play of the steam before his eyes. In spite of imperial edicts requiring the closing of all baths by the eleventh hour of the day, at the second hour of the night these showed no signs of emptying. The high arches of the ceiling rang with giggles and raucous laughter; rose and amber lamplight sparkled on the waters of the dark lapis pools. Through the skylight, stars blazed in a warm black ocean. Marcus stared straight ahead and thought of Tullia and Dorcas, wondering if he would find them after all, or whether they would simply retreat again, dreamlike, as Tullia had done from the catacombs, and from the temple on the Janiculum Hill.

The warmth of the water swirled around him. With barely a splash, a woman had slipped down to sit on the underwater bench at his side. She offered him a cup, dark wine, unmixed and smelling of the vineyards of Chios. “Wine sometimes helps sadness,” she said quietly, her eyes dark as plums in a fine-boned, angular face.

“Thank you,” he said and drank—cautiously, since he hadn’t stayed for the funeral dinner. The woman watched him, but said nothing, and in his heart he thanked her for her undemanding silence. After a time she leaned her head back against the tiled rim of the pool and like him seemed content for a time merely to watch the antics of the bathers. But he felt her awareness of him and, every now and then, the touch of those dark eyes.

It was the first time Marcus had been inside one of the fashionable baths-cum-brothel; for a while he only looked around him, at the expensive marbles, the mosaics on the tessellated walls, the giggling riot of wet gilded bodies and splashing water. It was as different as possible from the only other time he’d ever visited a brothel.

The memory of that first visit still scalded him with shame. It had been, he supposed, part of the reason he’d given up the gladiatorial games. For Sixtus had been right, of course: death, or the closeness to death, is a terrible aphrodisiac. For a boy of fifteen the sight of men trapped hopelessly between the threat of torture and the certainty of death in battle, the sight of women screaming under the claws of leopards worrying at their white, blood-splattered throats, brought a pain to his loins that nothing would satiate. The blowsy woman who’d picked him up as he’d stumbled, taut-legged, down the ramps had doubtless seen a million boys and men come walking out of there in that fashion. The brothel had been black as a pit and stunk like a vomitorium, and had left Marcus feeling shamed, filthy, and violated. When he’d discovered the next day that he’d traded his virginity for body lice, he had seriously considered suicide as an alternative to asking Straton for a remedy.

He had avoided Tullia for days, out of sheer shame.

The Golden Swordsman, however, was an entirely different matter, a world removed from the stinking cribs that lined the arcades of the arena. Golden lamps in the shape of nymphs hung low over the water; music pervaded the rooms. The place was redolent of perfume, bath oils, and women. Pillars of pink marble, veined and mottled with white and black, threw a kind of rosy reflection over everything, and on the arched pediment above the main entrance to the lobby, a voluptuous Leda twined in amazing embraces with her feathered lover.

Marcus found himself wondering what the rest of the place was like.

He looked quickly sideways, to meet those dark painted eyes. She sat close to him, her arm just brushing his beneath the rippling surface of the warm silken water. Her hair, piled in loose coils on top of her head so as not to get wet in the pools, looked tousled, the tendrils of it that hung about her face sticking to those high cheekbones.

She asked simply, “D’you want to come upstairs with me?”

He nodded, suddenly unable to speak for the dryness of his mouth.

He left the money on the table, near the floating light of the alabaster lamp. The sum had been written on the door as they’d gone in, along with her name, which was Antara. As he was putting on his clothes, she looked up from the pillow and smiled her slow lazy cat’s smile. “Will you stay for a cup of wine?”

Marcus shook his head. “I—I can’t.”

She seemed to accept this, held out her hand to him, and kissed his fingers softly. In the heat she was covered only by a thin sheet of gauze and by her long hair, which had come undone. “Will I see you again?”

He felt himself blush, a comprehensive effort that started from the navel, and hastily pulled on his tunic. She watched him uncritically, though her smooth lips tucked up a little at the corners. “I don’t think so,” he managed to stammer, his eyes wholly engaged by his belt buckle, and the tucks deepened.

“You’re a sweet boy,” she said inconsequentially. Marcus blundered first into the doorpost, and then out into the hall.

Above stairs Plotina’s was clean, but lacked the opulence of the baths. Frescoes and paintings on the walls depicted the loves of the Olympian gods in an awesome wealth of detail, but the rooms themselves were small and furnished sparsely. There were some two dozen of them on this floor—the one directly above the baths—laid out like the rooms in an apartment building along a wide central corridor. At one end a great stairway of worked chalcedony and lapis led to the baths, and the sound of them drifted upward like a breath of warmed perfume. At the other end of the hall a less elegant stairway led to the floors above.

For the moment, the hall was deserted.

The next floor up seemed to be laid out the same way, only the rooms were smaller. It had the smell of use, but as Marcus slipped down the hall like a thief, it appeared more deserted, quieter, and much darker. He paused before a shut door, hearing within the hissing whine of a whip. Tullia leaped to his mind, in a welter of anger and shame and guilt, then he heard a man’s voice whimper within and plead, “Again.”

Gilded nymphs cavorting in warm water, he supposed, were not to everyone’s taste.

He moved on cautiously up the stairs.

This floor was deserted, and hot as an oven after a baking day. It was lightless but for the wan reflection of moonlight that leaked through the big square windows at either end of the hall, and it smelled of dust and mice. The doors he paused beside were silent; opening them, he found most rooms empty, though one or two at this end showed signs of not-very-recent habitation by maids or slaves. One, horribly, turned out to be a punishment room, its bare blood-stained couch scarred all over with the cuts of whips and decorated at the four corners with chains. He crept silently on, the floor squeaking under his feet, sick with apprehension and not daring to picture who might have occupied that room.